MEGARA is a powerful instrument for the GTC 10m telescope lead by University Complutense de Madrid (UCM, PI: Armando Gil de Paz) and developed by a Consortium whose partner are, INAOE in Puebla, IAA in Granada and UCM and UPM in Madrid. MEGARA Fiber MOS is at the Folded-Cass F and has 2 observing modes on sky (LCB using the large central IFU 12.5 arcsec x 11.3 arcsec of 567 fibers, complemented with 8 x 7-fibers bundles for sky subtraction) and the Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOS) mode with 92 active positioner robots, each one handling a mini-bundle of 7-fiber (644 fibers in total), and patrol, as a whole, a total FoV of 3.5 arcmin x 3.5 arcmin. The fibers are connected with a long 44.5 fiber link to the spectrograph placed on Nasmyth-A platform. MEGARA provides intermediate-to-high spectral resolution (R~6,000, 12,000 and 18,700) with 6LR, 12MR, and 18HR VPHs, being 11 of them simultaneously mounted. Finally, MEGARA is a highly user-oriented instrument, which has a complete set of software tools for both, preparing the observations and reducing and visualizing the data.
MEGARA has been completed in a record time of 3 years from the signature of the detailed design (April 2014) contract to the end of integration at the GTC (April 2017). MEGARA arrived at the GTC on March 28th 2017. Integration took place between March and April 2017, DayTime calibration during May and June, and NightTime commissioning in 3 periods of 10-night each between June 24th and August 31st, having completely ready by 2017 September 1st.
This talk summarizes MEGARA capabilities and gives an overview of the on-sky performance and the first scientific results with the commissioning observations.